Search results

The article takes its point of departure in the current labor market debate on immigration policy and attempts to explore the way private labor market mediators involved in the integration of immigrants contribute to reproducing cultural stereotypes reminiscent of colonial ideas.

Findings are based on respondent-driven interviews with nine labor market mediators (seven women and three men) from eight private labor market agencies in Sweden.

The findings showed that the private labor market mediators put their trust in the neoliberal system and rely on the colonial discourses when convincing immigrants to assimilate into the dominant culture. At the same time, the findings also show that there is no evidence that the assimilating activities they offer will lead to long-term employment.

Given that migration across national borders has become a common phenomenon, the author suggests a call for critical reflections on the taken-for-granted notions of both self and others and the influences colonial discourses have on integration.

The author would suggest a shift of focus from immigrants' cultural adjustment to society's and employers' responsibilities and readiness to adjust to prevailing conditions.

The study contributes to the labor market literature and the diversity management literature by adding insights from public labor market mediators' experiences of the help they offer immigrants to enter the labor market. It shows how mediators make use of dominating discourses to secure cultural hegemony.

The purpose of this paper is to explore problematisations of urban diversity in urban and integration policies in Denmark and Sweden; the paper aims to show how such policies express social imaginaries about the self and the other and underlying assumptions of sameness that legitimise diverging ways of managing urban diversity and (re)organising the city.

Inspired by anthropology of policy and post-structural approaches to policy analysis, the authors approach urban and integration policies as cultural texts that are central to the organisation of cities and societies. With a comparative approach, the authors explore how visions of diversity take shape and develop over time in Swedish and Danish policies on urban development and integration.

Swedish policy constructs productiveness as crucial to the imagined national sameness, whereas Danish policy constructs cultural sameness as fundamental to the national self-image. By constructing the figure of “the unproductive”/“the non-Western” as the other, diverging from an imagined sameness, policies for organising the city through removing and “improving” urban diverse others are legitimised.

The authors add to previous research by focussing on the construction of the self as crucial in processes of othering and by highlighting how both nationalistic and colour-blind policy discourses construct myths of national sameness, which legitimise the governing of urban diversity. The authors highlight and de-naturalise assumptions and categorisations by showing how problem representations differ over time and between two neighbouring countries.

Economic integration of refugees remains a challenge for developed countries. Although refugees differ greatly from labor migrants in available resources and motivation toward self-employment, prevailing studies on minority and ethnic entrepreneurship tend to lump these different categories of migrants together. Based on theories of migrants’ economic embeddedness, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent to which family- and kinship-based resources affect self-employment duration among refugees and labor migrants.

Based on Cox regression models, this longitudinal study estimates the self-employment duration of 10,519 refugees and 2,503 labor migrants starting businesses in Sweden in the period 2006–2012.

Results reveal that while refugees are at a disadvantage to labor migrants in terms of self-employment duration, their higher level of family embeddedness in part helps them overcome these disadvantages. For refugees but not for labor migrants, co-location in an ethnic enclave also lowers the risk of them becoming unemployed after a spell in entrepreneurship.

This original paper provides empirical and theoretical contributions to research on migrants’ self-employment success. It also discusses contributions for research on entrepreneurs’ social embeddedness and refugees’ entrepreneurship.

To compare chronic health status, utilization of healthcare services and life satisfaction among immigrant women and their Canadian counterparts.

A secondary analysis of national data from the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS), 2015–2016 was conducted. The survey data included 109,659 cases. Given the research question, only female cases were selected, which resulted in a final sample of 52,560 cases. Data analysis was conducted using multiple methods, including logistic regression and linear regression.

Recent and established immigrant women were healthier than native-born Canadian women. While the Healthy Immigrant Effect (HIE) was evident among immigrant women, some characteristics related to ethnic origin and/or unhealthy dietary habits may deteriorate immigrant women's health in the long term. Immigrant women and non-immigrant women with chronic illnesses were both more likely to increase their use of the healthcare system. Notably, the present study did not find evidence that immigrant women under-utilized Canada's healthcare system. However, the findings showed that chronic health issues were more likely to decrease women's life satisfaction.

This analysis contributes to the understanding of immigrant women's acculturation by comparing types of chronic illnesses, healthcare visits, and life satisfaction between immigrant women and their Canadian counterparts.

Although there is a growing body of work on immigrants' information behavior, little is known about the pre-arrival information experiences of immigrants who consult formal information sources such as immigration agents. Drawn from a larger study on the information behavior of immigrants, this paper mainly reports the semi-structured interview findings on the pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants who used formal information sources with discussion on how that affected their post-arrival settlement into Canada.

The study used a mixed method approach with semi-structured interviews (n = 60) and surveys (n = 205) with participants who arrived in Canada between the years of 1971 and 2017. Data were collected from May 2017 to February 2018.

Although the overall scope of the original study is much larger, this paper features findings on the pre-arrival information experiences derived mainly from an analysis of interview data. This study provides insights into the pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants consulting formal information sources such as immigration firms, individual immigration consultants and more formal government agencies. The author introduces a new concept of “information crafting” by exploring the negative consequences of selective information sharing by immigration consultants/agents in newcomers' settlements in Canada, primarily positive information about life in Canada, sometimes with exaggeration and falsification. The interview participants shared story after the story of the settlement challenges they faced after arriving in Canada and how the expectations they built through the information received from immigration consultants and government agencies did not match after arrival. This study emphasizes the importance of providing comprehensive information about life in Canada to potential newcomers so that they can make informed decisions even before they apply.

The findings of this study have theoretical and practical implications for policy and research. This study provides insights into the complicated culturally situated pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants. Moreover, the study findings encourage researchers in various disciplines, including psychology, migration studies and geography, to delve more deeply into newcomers' information experiences using an informational lens to examine the information newcomers receive from diverse sources and their effects on their post-arrival settlement in a new country. The study challenges the general assumptions that formal information sources are always reputable, useful, and comprehensive, and it provides some future directions for research that seeks to understand the culturally situated information behavior of diverse immigrant groups.